General Health (Page 59)

Do you know a teenage girl who needs help dealing with her weight? We let you know about a local group that gets girls doing Zumba to get healthy. [caption id="attachment_5305" align="alignright" width="170" caption="Employee Teshema Anderson at the recent AIDS Walk in Charlottesville."][/caption] For World AIDS Day, we provided some facts…

Like many women, my mother faced few options when it came to her constant abdominal pain. After several years of heavy bleeding and cramping, the doctors threw their hands in the air. While she was in her late 30s, well before menopause, my mother underwent a full hysterectomy. [caption id="attachment_5251"…

The holiday shopping season is here. Are you looking for some healthier gift ideas this year? We talked to Cindy Parnell, MEd, RCEP, an exercise physiologist at UVA, and Gretchen Verrilli, a Heart Center exercise physiology intern, to get their ideas for you before you hit the stores. Healthy Food…

Hot flashes are a bothersome symptom of menopause. Right now, the only approved treatment is hormone therapy, but many women can’t or don’t want to take hormone therapy because it carries a small increased risk of breast cancer. Researchers at UVA have found that gabapentin, a drug developed to fight…

Cooking, eating, tying shoes and writing are all skills most adults take for granted. But for someone with Parkinson’s disease, they may be impossible. The involuntary shaking and other movement problems can force Parkinson’s patients to rely on caregivers for even the simplest tasks. Researchers at UVA will try to…

Previously, I spoke with John Schorling, MD, who leads mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) classes for doctors and other care providers twice a year with the UVA Mindfulness Center. Here's my conversation with Laura Meyer, a caregiver in the community who took one of Dr. Schorling’s classes in April of 2011. What is…

In January, we looked at several ways our hospital uses mindfulness and other integrative medicine methods to help patients heal. But patients also benefit when our doctors also learn to practice mindfulness - they give better care. To find out how this works, I spoke with both a mindfulness class…

Need some beach reading? Yesterday, we gave you some ideas for books about parenting and eating healthy, books with a health focus that don’t read like a textbook. Today, we’ve got more recommendations, all from UVA doctors and staff. Sports “Walk On: Life from the End of the Bench” by…

In this two-part series, we’ll cover books on parenting, sports injuries, psychology, healing, aging and more. It’s that time of year when summer reading lists pop up as abundantly as the mosquitoes; this year, we decided to add ours to the fray. To give our book recommendations a different kind…

Read the story of how one girl turned family health crises into a vocation helping others.